


Bitter Pill to Swallow

by imaginarypasta



Series: DP Side Hoes Week 2020 [7]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: (like peripherally), Identity Reveal, Not D-Stabilized Compliant, Not Phantom Planet Compliant (Danny Phantom), One Shot, Platonic Gray Ghost, Possession, i tried to avoid gore but it is briefly described, side hoes week, warning for broken limbs & hospitals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:01:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23252863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imaginarypasta/pseuds/imaginarypasta
Summary: (Sequel to "That Which is Most Admired") Valerie wakes Paulina and Star up wounded in the middle of the night during a sleepover, so they take her to the hospital.DP Side Hoes Week Day 7 (Cujo/Reveal) (just reveal, sorry)
Relationships: Danny Fenton & Valerie Gray, Valerie Gray & Paulina Sanchez & Star
Series: DP Side Hoes Week 2020 [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1668535
Comments: 2
Kudos: 49





	Bitter Pill to Swallow

**Author's Note:**

> oh i had so much fun with this week's prompts! as you can probably tell i got really into valerie & my girls at the end there, but they're pretty great so that's to be expected.

Paulina woke to the sound of muffled sobbing. Her eyes snapped open to reveal a figure hunched over by the window. She was perfectly silent, listening for Star’s heaving breathing and searching for the form of Valerie in the sleeping bag on the floor. Star was there, but Valerie was not.

“Val?” she asked to the figure in the window. The crying stopped for a moment, long enough she doubted what she’d heard.

Valerie’s voice whispered through the night, “Sorry, did I wake you?”

“No,” Paulina told her. She moved from the trundle bed to Valerie’s side at the window. It was difficult to see her, even with all of Star’s nightlights, because she was turned away from her, wrapped in on herself. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she answered.

“Why are you crying?”

She sighed, “I think I’m hurt.”

“Okay,” Paulina said gently. “What happened?”

“What?”

“You said you’re hurt. How did it happen?”

She thought for a long time. “I went out for a walk. There was a ghost." Her voice became uneven. "My dad’s gonna kill me.”

Paulina was quiet. Thinking.

“How hurt?” she finally asked. She didn’t answer. “How hurt,” Paulina repeated.

“I think I need to go to the hospital.”

“Can I see it?” Valerie followed her to the little string of lights along Star’s closet door. She pulled her arm from behind her back — Paulina hadn’t even noticed she’d been hiding it. She had to turn away instantly to stop her dinner from coming back up. “I think you definitely broke something in your arm,” she said unhelpfully. There was no doubt this was really bad. She could see the bone. It didn’t take a moment to move into action; Paulina knew injuries well. It came with getting them so often, even if they were never this serious.

“All right, we need to get you to the hospital.”

“I can’t,” Valerie whispered nervously. “He’ll be looking for me.”

“Who will?”

“I know you trust him,” she said, and Paulina could hear her voice crack, “but I don’t know what he’ll do if he finds me.”

“Who, Valerie?”

“Phantom,” she said, like Paulina was an idiot for not knowing. "He wants to get rid of me," she added.

She didn’t have time for this, so instead of responding, she woke up Star.

“Hey,” she said quietly as Star fluttered her eyelids open. “We need to take Val to the hospital. Can I have your keys?”

Star bolted upright, almost knocking Paulina's head with her own as she did, but the other girl avoided the collision. “What’s wrong?”

“She broke her arm, I think. It looks really bad.”

“Wait, let me get my parents.”

“No,” Valerie said urgently. “No adults. They’ll tell my dad.”

“You don’t think your dad will notice you broke your arm?” Paulina said back bitterly.

Valerie sighed and slumped against the wall.

“We can tell them in the morning,” Paulina offered, trying to make her voice a little sweeter. “But we need to get you there, like, now.”

Star agreed with a bit more coaxing and after leaving a note, and the girls shuffled into her car. Star’s knuckles were white on the wheel, Paulina fiddled nervously with the neckline of her shirt and kept sparing glances back to a pallid Valerie in the backseat. She clutched her arm with tears in her eyes.

“I can’t feel anything,” she said. “I think it might be broken.”

“That’s okay,” Star responded. “The doctors will fix it.”

Enough trips to the emergency room in the last few years meant Star didn’t need a map any longer. This drive was as ingrained as the one to her grandparents’ house. Paulina looked at the clock. Three in the morning. Her dad would be getting up to drive to work in Chicago. She wanted to call him and ask him what to do. She was grateful for Star, forever calm when she most definitely could not be.

Paulina had been to the ER after a ghost attack. Sometimes there was a line out the door. Tonight it was empty.

“I’m not going in there,” Valerie said.

“Why not?” Star asked, eyebrows drawn together.

“He’s gonna find me. He’ll find me.”

“Who will?” Star demanded.

“Phantom,” Paulina whispered, and Star’s eyebrows lifted with relief.

“No, no, no, he’s evil, you guys. He tried to hurt me tonight. You can’t let him find me.” Her voice was full of worry. It was only then that Paulina realized it had been since she’d woken up to hear her crying; it had just taken her this long to notice how out of place it was amidst her indifference about the injury. She felt the same panic welling up in her chest, but pushed it away.

“Okay, we’ll make sure you’re hidden,” Star reassured her. That seemed to help Valerie relax somewhat, so Star began to lead her to the entrance. “ _Shit_ ,” she said about halfway through the parking lot. She pressed her keys into Paulina’s hand. “Paulie, can you go get my purse? We need, um…” She furrowed her brow as she listed things off. “IDs and coins for a payphone, please. It should all be in there.”

Paulina nodded, grateful for something to do.

When she got into the waiting room, she found Valerie yelling at someone in scrubs.

“No! They have to come with me! I have to protect them! He’s gonna find me!” Paulina almost started crying at just how scared Valerie sounded. “Where’s Paulina? Did he take her?”

“I’m right here, Valerie,” she said, gently placing a hand on her shoulder. She jumped, but relaxed when she saw her face.

“Thank God. You can’t let him get you, okay, Paulina? Promise me.” Valerie looked at her with these big, urgent eyes. If she looked closely enough, she could see a faint green glow around her pretty brown irises.

“Okay, Valerie, I won’t. I promise.” Her face was bunched up like she was ready to cry, but she didn’t. It was more than Paulina could say for herself; she didn’t know when the tears started falling.

After almost an hour of waiting, a doctor finally came out.

“You ladies with Miss Gray?”

“Yes,” Star said immediately, jumping up. “What can you tell us?”

“Not much,” the woman responded.

She had straight black hair cut in a bob that brushed up against her chin. A single strand was stuck to her face. It was all Paulina could focus on. She felt her heart beat quickly in her chest. When had she gotten so nervous?

“She has an open fracture on her right wrist, but you probably already knew that. We need to get her into surgery ASAP. Have you called her legal guardian yet?”

Star and Paulina exchanged a worried look. Valerie was going to kill them for this. “No, but I can call Mr. Gray —um, that’s her dad — to come down here,” she offered.

“That would be great, honey,” the doctor smiled. She put a hand on Paulina’s shoulder. “You girls were smart to get her here.” Her smile faltered.

“What is it?” Paulina asked quickly.

“Well, it just looks like she has a bit of ecto-contamination. It’s no big deal, but I’m going to call my colleagues in town and ask them to come take a look at her.” She turned to Star. “You might want to tell her father that too, okay?”

Star nodded and went to the payphone on the wall. Paulina fell back into her seat, flipping aimlessly through one of the magazines on the table. There was so much waiting to be done.

* * *

The Fentons arrived at the same time as Mr. Gray, and Paulina was so tired, it took her a second too long to realize that _these_ were the colleagues the doctor was talking about.

“Mr. Gray, hi,” she said as he walked up to her.

“Paulina, hello,” he said, whispering to not wake Star sleeping beside her. “Thank you so much for taking Valerie here. I’ll tell you girls as soon as I know what’s going on. Tell Star I said thank you for calling me.”

“Of course.”

He and the Fentons spoke to a woman at the front and followed her back through the halls. Paulina didn’t notice they’d brought their son until she saw him flipping through a magazine idly, leg bouncing nervously. It was kind of sweet, she thought, that he’d come to see her.

She gently picked Star’s head off her shoulder to stand up.

“Yo, Fenton,” she said as she sat down a seat away from him. His eyes were red and puffy, like he’d been crying.

“Hi, Paulina,” he said, setting the magazine down on his lap. With all his tapping, it fell off, so he reached down to pick it up and held it awkwardly in his hands. She could see they were shaking, and if she looked really carefully, she could see the outline of a bruise on his forehead, mostly hidden by his bangs. “Have you heard anything?”

“Not really,” she answered. “We know it’s an open fracture on her wrist, but you could see that just by looking. And obviously your parents are here for a reason, so…”

“Right,” he said.

“I think she’ll be glad you came.” His face paled when she said that. “I mean it, she really cares about you.”

“Oh, thanks.” He hesitated for a moment. “Are you and Star doing okay?”

“Hmm?” she said, cocking her head to the side. “Oh, sure.”

“It’s just… I remember you threw up that one time Dash broke his leg during a football game.”

“Ah,” she said, surprised. “You remember that?” He nodded. “Yeah, I just used to have an issue with, like, injuries. But I’ve kind of had to get over that.” He slumped down in his seat.

“Right.”

“Because of the ghost attacks and stuff.”

“No, yeah, I got it.” He sounded sad when she said it. Guilty, maybe.

Paulina did not address this, both because she really didn’t know him very well and because Mr. Gray stepped into the waiting room and sat between them.

“She’s doing okay. I just spoke to them and they’ll go into the OR within the hour. They, um… The Fentons that is, think she was possessed.”

“Possessed?” Paulina asked. Her eyes flickered to where Danny was biting the nail on his thumb.

“By a ghost.” Mr. Gray said, nodding. His hands were squeezed tightly on his knees. “Paulina, do you have any idea what happened to her?”

She answered, “She said she went on a walk and a ghost attacked her.”

“That’s five in a day,” he said. “If you don’t mind,” he said, standing. “I’m going to go on a walk outside. I need some fresh air. Would you come out to get me if they let us in?”

“Sure, Mr. Gray,” Paulina said. The room was quiet for a while, except for the buzz of the fluorescent lights and Star’s deep sleeping breaths. Paulina thought she should probably call her parents, but she was a little too wound up to do that right now. “What do you know about possession,” she asked Danny instead.

“Huh?” Danny said.

“Your parents do ghost stuff, right?” It was a rhetorical question, but he nodded anyway. “Do you know what could have happened to her?”

“No idea,” he said. He was lying, and she could tell. Paulina decided this meant that possession was likely very, very bad news and he didn’t want to be the one to tell her.

* * *

Paulina, Star, and Danny got to visit Valerie after Mr. Gray had left the room and passed out on the waiting room couches. The sun was already pretty high in the sky when they entered the room, though the curtains were drawn. The Fentons were walking out of the room as they walked in.

“Be careful with her, kids,” Maddie Fenton said quietly. “Possession can have a lot of harmful side effects on the mind. Might make her scatterbrained or paranoid for a bit. Try to keep it nice and gentle, all right.”

“And don’t touch her,” Jack Fenton advised. “We still don’t know the residual effects of overshadowing on the body regarding ectoplasm.”

He clapped a hand on Danny’s shoulder, holding him back as the girls went in. In that space, Maddie wrapped him up in a hug. “She'll be okay, Danny,” she whispered before the couple left and he joined the girls in the room.

Paulina and Star scooted chairs up close to her bed where her eyes were closed, but Danny stayed back. After a few minutes, she woke up gently.

“Hey,” she smiled at them, seeming a bit too happy.

“Hi,” the girls returned in unison.

“Hey,” Danny echoed.

“You guys came back! I thought for sure you were goners.”

Star and Paulina exchanged a wordless glance.

“Really, I thought you were gonna get attacked by ghosts while I was under the knife. I’m so glad you’re _alive_!” She sang the last bit, dissolving into giggles when she did. Apparently, Paulina thought, possession really did affect the mind. It also could’ve been the painkillers, she realized.

Her eyes followed the outline of the room until she saw Danny, and she gasped. “Oh! All three of my friends are here!” she said excitedly.

She lifted her hand and clapped her fingers against her palm, beckoning for him to come closer. He did, and she grabbed his hand. Despite what his father said, he didn’t seem to care much. Paulina looked, and she was pretty sure he was crying; she didn’t say anything, because so was she.

“Guys,” she exclaimed seriously. "We need to get out of here. It's dangerous." She beamed. “We should go on a road trip together!”

“Maybe when you get better,” Star laughed.

“Ugh!” Valerie said. “You’re lame.” She stopped giggling after that, eyes closing every few moments, but she was clearly trying to keep herself awake. “Sorry… 'm tired…”

“Val,” Paulina said softly. “What happened? We were worried sick about you.”

Valerie was quiet, staring down at the knitted blanket on her feet. Finally, she said, “I have to tell you guys something.” Her voice was clearer, more serious than before.

“Okay,” Star whispered, matching her volume. “Go ahead.”

“I’m…” Her eyes were closed in deep concentration. The hand that was clutched around Danny’s was squeezing visibly hard, so Paulina scooped up the fingers not in a cast in her own. He saw this and clearly wanted to say something, but she gave him an indignant look and he didn’t. Star rested her own hand on the spot where the girls’ interlocked. “I didn’t go on a walk tonight.”

They waited for her to continue, and when she did, it was pieced together. Not like she couldn’t think of the words, but like she was forcing herself to say them. “I’m… I was out because I saw that there was a ghost. I’m the Red Huntress.” All three of her friends’ eyes widened. “I know it how it sounds, but I promise it’s true.”

“I believe you,” Danny said instantly.

“Me, too,” said Star. Paulina nodded in agreement.

“I just want to protect people. And I do. But I was just so exhausted after today.” She sighed. “And Phantom was there,” she growled. “Of course. And he…”

“He what?” Star prompted.

“Well, he possessed me. And I just… I was falling because the ghost had just hit me, and I couldn’t control my hoverboard for some reason, and I suddenly just felt, like, his mind in mine. He just sort of flew me to the ground, and at the last second dropped me from a few feet up and I stupidly tried to catch myself. And he flew off. Just to beat up the ghost, too. But I could _hear_ his thoughts. It was all scattered and rough, but I could hear them.”

Tears fell from her eyes. “He was thinking, _Get her out of here_.” She sniffled but didn’t move her hands from her friends’ to wipe her nose. “And I know you guys trust him, I really do. But he was really ready to kill me, I think. I’m just trying to protect the people I love. Protect _you_ guys.”

“Valerie,” Star said. “You do a great job at that. And we love you for it.”

“Yeah, Val, you’re amazing,” Danny agreed quietly.

She turned to Paulina, wide eyes bracing themselves for her not to accept what she was saying. But of _course_ she did.

“Does your dad know?” was all she could ask. Valerie avoided her gaze and nodded. “Well, I get why he’s been so worried about you.” She tilted her head a little bit and Valerie looked back up at her. “Thank you for telling us." Valerie shook her head.

"I should've said something sooner. I scared you guys tonight."

"Val, we're friends, you're always fine to scare us if you're in trouble," Paulina said. "We’ve got your back, okay? Always.”


End file.
